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‘A Quiet Place’ Of Dysfunction And Dystopia

A production photo from the Houston Grand Opera’s “Quiet Place,” a world premiere in 1983.Credit
Jim Caldwell/Houston Grand Opera

AS the motorcade carrying the body of Leonard Bernstein passed through Brooklyn on its way to Green-Wood Cemetery 20 years ago, construction workers removed their yellow hard hats and called out, “Goodbye, Lenny!” It was a gesture of affection unthinkable for any other classical musician. In death, as in life, Bernstein was the exception: capable of anything and, almost, everything. One of the great conductors of the 20th century, he was also a composer, educator, television personality and political activist who at one point hobnobbed with the Black Panthers.

Bernstein struggled throughout his career to balance the many things that brought him fame — his conducting, his path-breaking Broadway musicals, his TV specials — and the one thing that never did, writing serious classical music. Like Offenbach, who tried at the end of his life to compose an opera that would transcend his frothy operettas, Bernstein longed to be remembered for works more “substantial” than “On the Town” and “West Side Story.”

This longing was most intense when it came to opera, the genre that consistently eluded his creative grasp. “If I can write one real moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work),” he wrote in 1948, “I shall be a happy man.”

On Wednesday “A Quiet Place,” the “real moving” opera that Bernstein had aspired to, will open at the New York City Opera. To the amazement of George Steel, the general manager and artistic director of City Opera, this first performance in the city Bernstein loved more than any other comes almost 30 years after the work’s premiere. “I literally cannot believe it has not been done in New York,” Mr. Steel said recently.

In its original form “A Quiet Place” was a sprawling one-act opera intended to be performed alongside Bernstein’s well-received 1952 one-act “Trouble in Tahiti.” The score of “Tahiti,” about a prosperous, unhappily married suburban couple, had co-opted pop song structures to create an uneasy mix of exuberance and melancholy, grounded in American sounds but with the lyrical impulse of 19th-century opera.

The older work had its roots in autobiographical truth. The names of the married couple were originally Sam and Jennie, Bernstein’s parents’ names, though the wife’s was changed to the more singable Dinah (the name of a Bernstein grandmother). Like their namesakes, Bernstein’s parents fought bitterly, and their acrimony often resulted from the family’s frequent relocations; as Sam made more money, their houses grew larger. The opera’s trenchant critique of the suburban American dream was deeply personal.

When Bernstein began to contemplate a sequel to “Tahiti,” he was again inspired by events in his life. His wife, the actress Felicia Montealegre, died in 1978, and he was drawn to a proposal by the opera director Stephen Wadsworth (currently represented at the Metropolitan Opera by the new production of Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”) for a work that would focus on the now elderly Sam and Dinah mourning the death of their son. The details eventually changed — in the final draft it was Dinah who had died — but the focus remained on mourning and the truths it can reveal. The opera expanded from a central funeral scene, and charted a path toward a difficult, ambiguous reconciliation for the members of the estranged and troubled family.

“A Quiet Place” both revisits and intensifies the story and the score of “Trouble in Tahiti,” a work whose melancholy was wrapped in a shiny musical package. In “A Quiet Place” the ribbons and glitter are gone: the music is jagged and fractured, with polyphonic chorales and jazzy burlesques that explode in bursts of dissonance.

Thirty years after the action of “Tahiti” the young son, Junior, is now gay and possibly schizophrenic; his former lover is married to his younger sister, Dede. During his mother’s funeral Junior starts a striptease in front of his father, knocking into the coffin in the process; later he claims that he and Dede experimented sexually when they were children.

This was neither the sound nor the subject matter that audience members at the 1983 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera were expecting. Like many of Bernstein’s listeners, they came anticipating “West Side Story” and “Candide,” not 12-tone astringencies. What’s more, the structure of the evening did the new work no favors. The 45-minute lyrical “Trouble in Tahiti” was presented in its entirety, followed by the two-hour “Quiet Place,” which flirted with both atonality and incest. The audience response was tepid, and the critics were largely and loudly negative.

Photo

A 1952 Tanglewood rehearsal for “Trouble in Tahiti,” with from left, Leonard Bernstein, Sarah Caldwell and Boris Goldovsky. (Seymour Lipkin is in the pit.)Credit
Whitestone Photographers

“It was 150 million people from all over the globe saying, ‘You are awful, why can’t you write “West Side Story” again?’ ” Mr. Wadsworth said recently. “It wasn’t anyone’s favorite moment.”

The opera was drastically revised for performances at La Scala in Milan and the Kennedy Center in Washington, which had commissioned the work with Houston. Some plot strands were eliminated. Most crucial, the two one-acts were compressed into a single three-act opera. “Trouble in Tahiti” was transformed into a flashback and inserted into the center of the newer work, a structure that made both musical and dramatic sense. Though still a long evening, it flowed now, and audiences were, for better or worse, introduced at the start to Bernstein’s thornier late style.

But the idea that the work was a failure had been fixed in the minds of both audiences and critics. The revised version, which had its premiere at La Scala in 1984, garnered mostly positive reviews, but the opera has since languished. Like many of Bernstein’s “serious” compositions, “A Quiet Place” is more discussed than heard.

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The Vienna State Opera agreed to mount a production in 1986 on the condition that Bernstein conduct; he took this as an insult yet complied. The performances were recorded and released by Deutsche Grammophon but led to little new interest, and the work was most recently performed in an amateur production at the Lowell House Opera at Harvard University in 1991.

The opera’s themes — the mutability of sexuality, dysfunctional families, suburbia as dystopia — were once ahead of their time; if anything they are now overfamiliar, and Bernstein’s treatment of them is decidedly unsubtle. He loads, and finally overloads, the opera with Mahlerian crashes and overwrought symbolism. Dinah’s fantasy of a garden in “Trouble in Tahiti,” the occasion for the opera’s most achingly eloquent melody, becomes, a bit too neatly, the setting of the third act of “A Quiet Place”: the ruined garden that must be redeemed or reclaimed. Or, poignantly, revisited: no garden in music is more famous than the one invoked at the close of Bernstein’s “Candide.” “Can’t we find our way back to the garden where we began?” pleads the libretto of “A Quiet Place.” Bernstein tried.

Still, the opera is often riveting, with passages of great beauty interspersed among the ponderous moments. The first act, set in the funeral home, reflects the collaborators’ interest in the operas of Janacek, whose vocal lines overlap and intertwine, hewing closely to the patterns of normal speech. Snippets of the lyricism of “Trouble in Tahiti” sneak into the score, but in a stunted, quickly suffocated form, pale echoes of long-abandoned hopes.

The second-act flashbacks to “Trouble in Tahiti” take on a dreamlike quality, which will be emphasized by Christopher Alden in what he calls his “expressionist, surreal” production for City Opera. Mr. Alden said recently that his goal was “to try to get at how close memories and dreams are, how closely and weirdly and uncomfortably they sit with our present moment.”

During a rehearsal of the funeral scene Mr. Alden sought to bring out the work’s strangeness rather than apologize for it. The chorus of funeral guests moved as a single, stylized unit. At one moment everyone suddenly faced forward; the next, everyone backed away in unison. As in Mr. Alden’s elegantly disorienting production of “Don Giovanni” at City Opera last year, the eeriness and conceptual originality work to save the opera from its own potential staleness.

What is certainly not stale is the score’s eclecticism, its voracious absorption of genres and styles. Perhaps that was what so discomfited the audience at the premiere: not that “A Quiet Place” was more “Wozzeck” than “West Side Story,” but that it saw no conflict in being both, simultaneously. Today such uneasy balancing acts are commonplace, feats that almost every young composer keeps attempting, but an aspect of Bernstein’s legacy that we are still assimilating.

“People don’t know this piece,” George Steel said, “and that’s why its lessons haven’t been absorbed. Just getting the piece in the ears and life and heart of audiences is what this production is about. There’s a huge amount to learn from it.”

“A Quiet Place” is the last of Bernstein’s major compositions to arrive in the city whose culture he dominated for nearly 50 years. Separated now by decades from the celebrity and the expectations, we can close one chapter of debate about him — about his tempos, his politics, his personal life — and open another. Finally finished discovering him, we can at last start trying to understand him.

Correction: October 31, 2010

An article last Sunday about Leonard Bernstein’s opera “A Quiet Place,” which opened on Wednesday at New York City Opera, misstated the year and location of its last staging. It was at the Lowell House Opera at Harvard University in 1991, not at the University of Cambridge in 1988.

A version of this article appears in print on October 24, 2010, on Page AR17 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘A Quiet Place’ Of Dysfunction And Dystopia. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe